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Exit the Crew Dragon. Enter one other Crew Dragon.
On Wednesday evening, SpaceX will carry one other crew of astronauts to the Worldwide Area Station for a keep of about six months. Crew-3 is the identify of the mission, and its astronauts will substitute Crew-2, the quartet of NASA, European and Japanese astronauts who accomplished a water touchdown within the Gulf of Mexico on Monday evening.
When is the launch and the way can I watch it?
Liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, with the astronauts within the Crew Dragon sitting on high, is scheduled for 9:03 p.m. Japanese time on Wednesday. NASA will host a livestream of the launch on NASA TV and its YouTube channel starting at 4:45 p.m.
Climate round NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart in Florida, the place Falcon 9 will launch, is 80 p.c favorable, based on the U.S. Area Pressure’s forty fifth Climate Squadron.
Why was Crew-3’s earlier departure delayed?
Crew-3 was initially scheduled to launch on Halloween, nevertheless it was haunted by a number of delays.
The primary delay on Oct. 31 was prompted by dangerous climate, and the subsequent was over a “minor medical challenge” regarding one of many astronauts. NASA declined to specify the character of the difficulty — moreover noting it was unrelated to Covid-19 — or point out which astronaut it affected.
Confronted with compounding delays, NASA opted to concentrate on returning the astronauts of Crew-2 to Earth from the house station earlier than launching Crew-3. That prevented a easy handover in orbit between the 2 crews. Now, the house station has only one NASA astronaut and two Russian astronauts on board, a small head depend that makes upkeep of the house station troublesome.
Who’re the astronauts?
Three of the 4 astronauts on Crew-3 are flying to house for the primary time.
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Raja Chari, the mission’s commander, is 44 and would be the fifth astronaut of Indian descent to go to house. He was a take a look at pilot and an Air Pressure colonel who flew fight missions in Iraq earlier than becoming a member of NASA’s astronaut corps in 2017.
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Matthias Maurer, Crew-3’s mission specialist, is a German astronaut representing the European Area Company. Mr. Maurer, 51, joined the European astronaut corps in 2015.
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Kayla Barron, 34, additionally joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2017. She was among the many first group of ladies to serve on a Navy submarine. She and Mr. Chari are each members of NASA’s Artemis astronaut corps — a cadre of 18 astronauts who’re eligible to journey to or across the moon sooner or later.
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Tom Marshburn, 61, who will set off on his third trek to orbit since becoming a member of NASA’s astronaut corps in 2004. Mr. Marshburn has flown on two house autos previously, serving as a crew member aboard NASA’s Area Shuttle Endeavour in 2009 and on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft in 2013.
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